Some Days

Some days the sky is a dirty white. In early spring there are days of steady rain, wind, mud, and hardened piles of dirt-encrusted snow trimming the remnants of last years grass. Some days this is what my heart feels like. All heavy, water-logged sadness, dirty and soggy. Some days I fight a losing battle against the list of things that weigh me down. The list is worn, with tattered edges and dog-eared pages. It’s sticking to me like so much early spring muck sticking to a rain boot.

On this dreary late winter/early spring morning I learned that my dear aunt’s cancer is back, in a new spot, stage 4. This woman who is an angel on earth, twinkly eyed, always smiling. She’s like a sweet little Santa Claus, if Santa were a hip, hilarious woman who stuck around all year, gave adorable nicknames, and hugged everyone. You simply cannot help but adore her. The cancer is in her back now. Surgery, radiation, and chemo on the way. Again. This day the sadness wells up as I think of her sweet face and puff of white hair. She has looked the same for 20 years I swear.

When sadness wells up, it washes in a host of familiar sorrows, like the tide washes in seaweed on a beach…

He has autism. Anxiety. Rigidity. He hates how his mind works, and I don’t know how to make him see the beauty in it. I don’t know how to parent this amazing shining diamond, this precious fragile egg.

She is picking up on the amount of attention his melt-downs require. She keeps so much in. I don’t know how to parent this soft, tender shoot, this little locked up heart.

They still haven’t called back about whether she needs the heart catheterization procedure, and I’ve been chasing them around for weeks.

I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m failing at parenting. I’m not keeping the house up. I’m not working enough, I’m not sure if I should write, or what it would add if I do. I’m stuck.

This post was going to be simply about that. Sadness, and being stuck in the mire. The daily battle against being completely bogged down in it.

But then I went on FB for a little mental break in the middle of writing and I saw this post by Matt Stinton (http://www.mattstinton.com/home//breaking-up-with-anxiety). And it was written right to me. It was about anxiety, but substitute ‘grief’ or ‘fear’ or ‘sadness’ or a host of entangling emotions and I think it still works.

And I realized I’ve been listening to this voice:

“This is never going to change and you’ll just have to live with this for the rest of your life.”

Some days, I’ve even been repeating what it says over my life to other people. Seeing it written down like this…I don’t want to hear it, and I certainly don’t want to speak it.

Some days, in the early spring in Maine, it feels like there hasn’t been enough sunlight to survive on for months. (Because there hasn’t.) And it can get inside you, creep in and darken the edges of your mind and give everything a grimmer, shadowy hue.

So this post I read came at just the right time to remind me: I am a believer, a child of God. Hope is not only available to me, it is living within me. Like a tiny seed buried in the darkness of the soil hope is there, even in the colorless landscape of early spring, even in a soul heavy with grief. It will never leave me. But whether that seed stays buried and untended or is remembered, watered, and opened up to what sunlight there is, that is up to me. The blog post went on to say:

You can’t have hope and be discouraged at the same time. They are opposites and cannot co-exist. Hope is the seed of breakthrough. If you have hope then victory is only a matter of time.

(and)

Which voice will you listen to? The voice that builds you up or the one that tears you down? The one that promises life and freedom or the voice that tells you that you’re doomed to a life of captivity?

The post talked about how actual brain pathways are formed by repetitive thought, especially when coupled with high emotion or trauma. I’ve heard this many times. So there is no easy fix here. Being a believer doesn’t mean I have access to a genie-in-a-bottle, or that a quick fix is a simple prayer away. It doesn’t come with the types of guarantees that I find appealing: easy, fast, convenient, with easy to read instructions. But there are promises that can “renew my mind”...if I choose to think on them. Choices, always choices, never coercion or magic beans. Which is good, but hard.

A final bit of the post:

He is always turning night into day and winter into spring. He is a God of promise and redemption. Whatever you’re dealing with right now, He is bringing the answer. Not only that, but once you have victory, He’s going to give you authority over the problem you’ve struggled with. He’s going to make you a threat to the enemy and is going to use you to break people out of the same bondage you were in. How’s that for revenge?

A little ray of sunlight that on some days, is sorely needed. A little seed of hope. And the thought of socking it to the dark, dreary sadness that tries to hold me in an emotional straight-jacket.

I lean toward the melancholy, a trait of empathetic souls I suppose, and some days it is plain hard to hold on to hope. I’ll have to choose to lean in to the promises available to me. I will need to keep company with those who will help me dig for hope, even when it feels like I’m on my knees scratching in the dirt with my fingernails.

Circumstances do not go away. He will have autism all of his life. The hole in her heart will need to be closed, or it won’t. Auntie Pat has cancer, and it may claim her life. As I was finishing this post my neighbor was whisked away in an ambulance, I don’t know that story yet. People will disappoint me; I will fail, and not be enough. Hardship and pain will not go away. In this life, there will be trouble. I am counting on that tiny seed, down in the dirt of my soul, to keep me living a beautiful life in the midst of it, and focused on the promise of a new life free from all of it.